Mean Girls

March 17, 2005

In the tradition of trancejen (link down and on the left), I’ve decided to write about my past more than my present in this entry because life these days is relatively boring and I’m sure you’re just dying to know that I ate popcorn while watching American Idol last night or that I cut my finger on a folder in my desk drawer . . . I mean – honestly.

So – the other day we (meaning my boss and the girl across the hall) were talking about mean things other kids did to us when we were kids.

My oldest memory of cruelty is relatively fuzzy. We’d just moved into our new house in Brusly, where I grew up, and I had just turned four. I was invited out to “play” by the some of the neighborhood girls who were all about 6 or 7.

Anyway – they put ants on me.

Seriously. (My boss thought this was the funniest thing she’d every heard, by the way.)

They stirred up a large pile with a stick and then they put them on me. And I screamed and I ran inside and I never played with them again. For some reason – the girls that lived across the street from me were always cruel. They were the kind of girls that I always felt were secretly laughing at me. Sometimes, they did nothing to hide their laughter. They sneered at me when I got on the bus.

“Nice jeans.” (snicker, giggle)

Great. Never wearing these again. Okay – so they have large embroidered hearts on the butt. Isn’t that the style?

I did have some friends on the other end of the street. We lived on one long street so it wasn’t really a neighborhood. Anyway my best friend lived four houses down. She was a biter.

The cruelest thing she ever did to me was this:

I’d just gotten a pack of headbands – the plastic kind that came in different colors, etc. Anyway – I was thrilled to have them. I walked down to her house and she had “another friend” over. You never wanted to be with this girl in a group of three. You can guess who was the odd man out. She and this “other friend” were jumping on her trampoline. Anyway I walked up to the fence and said:

“Come and see what I got!”

I was planning to offer her one of them – even though I didn’t really want to give any of them away. But – I didn’t want to be selfish.

“What, Ginger? I’m busy!”

“Just come see. Pleeeeeeeeeeeze?”

So she jumped down and stormed over. She was quite a huffy little girl.

“Look!” I said, pointing to the headband that I had on.

Without much warning, she reached up (I was taller), snatched the headband out of my head and snapped it in two. She then threw it on the ground and squinted her beady little eyes.

I was so shocked and stung I could barely speak.

“That’s what I think of your stupid headband!” she said and ran back to the trampoline where she and her “other friend” laughed hysterically and jumped. I think the jumping made it worse.

“Go home, Ginger.”

And so I went. Crushed. Crying.

The saddest part is that I didn’t want to tell my mom what she had done because I didn’t want her to forbid me to play with her.

You think I’m crazy. But she had a trampoline and a grandmother four more houses down with a built-in pool. These things are valuable commodities to a seven year old kid. And so I counted my losses (a broken plastic headband worth a nickel) and swam and trampolined for a few more summers until she moved away.

I never forgot, though.

Obviously.

So – what about you? What’s the meanest thing a kid ever did to you when you were young?